The mother of six with hot hubby Brad Pitt opened up about embracing her age (and gracefully, at that), and how she loves menopause in a new interview with Australia’s Daily Telegraphpublished Sunday (Nov. 22) while promoting their new film By the Sea.

“I actually love being in menopause,” she explained. “I haven’t had a terrible reaction to it, so I’m very fortunate.”

Feeling more “settled” now that she’s older, the actor-director added, “I feel happy that I’ve grown up. I don’t want to be young again.”

Jolie has been very candid about her health and the preventative measures she’s taken to reduce her risk of cancer. Her mother Marcheline Bertrand passed away from ovarian cancer at the age of 56 in 2007, as did her grandmother at the age of 45. After learning that she too carries the BRCA1 gene (a gene giving her an 87% chance of developing the disease), Jolie most recently underwent surgery in March of this year to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes; in 2013, she got a double mastectomy. As a result, she’s reduced her chances to under 5% and has been forced into early menopause.

As for how her preventative surgeries have affected her relationship with Pitt, Jolie explained,

[Brad] made it very, very clear to me that what he loved and what was a woman to him was somebody who was smart, and capable, and cared about her family, that it’s not about your physical body. So I knew through the surgeries that this wasn’t going to be something that made me feel like less of a woman, because my husband wouldn’t let that happen.

Since her surgeries, she’s penned two New York Timesop-eds in order to raise cancer and women’s health awareness: the first after her double mastectomy, entitled “My Medical Choice” and the second after her March surgery, entitled “Diary of a Surgery.”

The gorgeous actress wrote in the latter essay, “I feel feminine, and grounded in the choices I am making for myself and my family. I know my children will never have to say, ‘Mom died of ovarian cancer.’”